1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to electronic messaging management, and more particularly to a message interface which enables sending a selected portion of an electronic message to one or more selected recipients and another portion of the message to one or more other recipients.
2. Related Art
Electronic messaging, such as e-mail, is such a powerful and desirable tool that it has been referred to as the “killer application” driving early development of the Internet. One reason for the power and popularity of electronic messaging is that it facilitates very efficient communication with groups. In particular, with electronic messaging it is easy to send a message to numerous people all at once. However, when communicating with numerous people it is often desirable to be more selective. For example, it is sometimes best for different members of the group to receive somewhat different messages for reasons of tactfulness, or to save time for one or more of the readers, or to direct the attention of different readers to different aspects of the communication. Conventionally, to meet these different needs independent messages are composed and sent one-by-one to different sets of recipients.
While electronic messaging is a vast improvement over sending hard copy letters, nevertheless generating and sending different electronic messages one-by-one still places a burden on the user, and this conventional electronic messaging practice does not make full use of the capability of modem computer systems, which have the potential to relieve users of this sort of burden. Therefore a need exists for improvements in the generating and sending of related electronic messages to numerous recipients.